the noise of the street enters the househttps://thestreeet.wordpress.com
ô mon corps, fait toujours de moi un homme qui s'interroge.Thu, 14 Dec 2017 02:41:39 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/https://s2.wp.com/i/buttonw-com.pngthe noise of the street enters the househttps://thestreeet.wordpress.com
Documentation, Process, Living the Lifehttps://thestreeet.wordpress.com/2010/05/13/documentation-process-living-the-life/
https://thestreeet.wordpress.com/2010/05/13/documentation-process-living-the-life/#respondThu, 13 May 2010 17:00:04 +0000http://thenoiseofthestreet.net/?p=607]]>It’s kind of challenging to live and document the living at the same time. You need to have your full focus in two places at once — one, on actual life, and the other, on creating a meaningful record of the actual life. I was never the kind of person who was able to take photographs while on vacation. I’d return home with a roll (or memory stick) with about a dozen photos from the first two days, and not much else. You’d think I’d lost my camera.

The question becomes, for me, how do I leave a trail — one that I can annotate — of a process like running for public office? How do I — but only inasmuch as I need to to earn a degree — document something that is fraught with emotional and intellectual investment, without losing that sense of investment, while at the same time conveying a convincing, affective sense of how the process worked?

The first great thing is that I can create an archive of every email I sent and received about the electoral process. This is relatively easy — I just need to find a place and a way to store this stuff (preferably online) that gives me the tools to annotate it. We’ve been looking at Omeka for another project, but making an Omeka site as the comprehensive documentation of what has been happening to me lately seems like a really good possibility, as well.

This is also useful because eventually we might make a book about this. Filled with reproductions of campaign ephemera, transcripts of speeches, and early drafts of official documents (including those scrawled on by friends and such), and ideally bound with a version of our campaign poster, I’ve been thinking about this book for a while now.

The other thing of it is — I need a little help parsing what happened these past few months. I feel a little like I took everything I understood about what I am and what I’m doing with my life, upended it, and shook it. A lot of stuff fell out. A lot of stuff got rearranged. The future today looks different from the way it looked at the beginning of the semester. That’s good, in a way. It’s also frightening. But, as Shasti said, say hello to the new normal.

(On that note this site is going to be getting an overhaul soon. Might be offline for a few weeks.)

]]>https://thestreeet.wordpress.com/2010/05/13/documentation-process-living-the-life/feed/0CaydenTo Doc, or Not to Dochttps://thestreeet.wordpress.com/2010/05/05/to-doc-or-not-to-doc/
https://thestreeet.wordpress.com/2010/05/05/to-doc-or-not-to-doc/#commentsWed, 05 May 2010 16:24:51 +0000http://thenoiseofthestreet.net/?p=603]]>This has been a rough semester for me. I’m really glad to say it’s almost over, and it hasn’t been a total wash. I really did need grad school to kick my ass a little bit and remind me to be humble, justify myself better, and keep being a curmudgeon. I’m working out some really interesting stuff for myself with regards to the role of play in civic engagement and bureaucracy, the role of fun in governance, and the importance of gamic attitudes in grappling with major social issues. I’m paving this path with good reading, some experiments, and the simple act of standing up for what I believe is right.

I’ve started having thoughts about what it means to “document” an event, though. I got my ass kicked in first year review for presenting work that was in process (apparently a faux pas, but I didn’t know that at the time), and not having documentation for the work that I have been doing. I feel a bit like a cranky awkward camera user, but I don’t feel like it’s my job to document the things that I make happen. I generally leave a pretty good paper trail in most instances, but there is something about my own bias as the maker that makes it seem to me like I shouldn’t be doing my own image production or video production to show what happened.

On the other hand it seems a little exploitative for me to say, “document what happens yourself.” Kyle pointed out that I can always ask friends to lurk around with cameras (which sometimes happens of its own accord), because they’ll probably find the things that other people would find interesting to record. At least there is always the possibility of them creating footage I couldn’t, and I can take some editorial freedom with what gets included in, say, a video documentation of a performance/play action.

I still don’t know. There is something about creating documentation for something that is designed to be experiential that is very unappealing to me. If you weren’t there, maybe you should have been. Maybe what I should do is get one of the documentary filmmaker grads to follow me around with a camera. (But of course that seems more than a little conceited.) Of course I’m going to have to suck it up and document things, because at some point I need to show that I’ve been doing work and so deserve the eventual degree that comes from that. Nevertheless, the whole idea of it kind of leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Shouldn’t I just be doing what I want to be doing, for the sake of doing it or because it’s the right thing to do?

(Maybe I’m just bitter.)

]]>https://thestreeet.wordpress.com/2010/05/05/to-doc-or-not-to-doc/feed/1CaydenBurnouthttps://thestreeet.wordpress.com/2010/03/28/burnout/
https://thestreeet.wordpress.com/2010/03/28/burnout/#respondSun, 28 Mar 2010 20:34:58 +0000http://thenoiseofthestreet.net/?p=592]]>I’m experiencing a little bit of an intellectual burnout this semester. I kind of want to crawl under a rock and draw pictures of animals with colored pencils, or ride my bike around Forest Lawn all day. Not that I’m not still interested in the things I’ve been thinking about lately, but I have been feeling the drain of other demands, and they’ve been taking momentum away from the bigger projects, and I just don’t have the energy to focus on all the things I have to do as well as the things I want to do. It’s kind of ironic, though, because I feel like the reason I am in graduate school should be to work on these bigger things. I’m a little disappointed and am feeling a bit of a crisis of faith in what I’m doing now. As I told Feliz the other day, though, I kind of feel like I can’t do this any other way, though, and this is a step toward where I want to be.

I’m still trying to cling furiously to the ideas I developed earlier this semester. I went out and bought Late Marxism on Anna’s recommendation, as a companion to Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory and Negative Dialectics. I’m excited to see that other people are interested in what I have to say on this topic. I’m hoping this summer gives me time to do some serious reading. One of the weird things I’ve been finding is just that I’m way more well-read than any 23-year-old is expected to be, but I feel like I’m fighting a losing battle when it comes to finding, absorbing, and understanding ideas. There’s just too much out there. That’s probably another reason I feel kind of burnt out at the moment.

I think it’s also a little tough for me, because politically I’ve been doing a lot more wrangling than I had been. There’s the GSA election, there’s PHEEIA, and there’s a lethargic, willfully ignorant group of people to contend with. Some days I just feel like I care way more than anybody else does, or at least that I’m trying harder. And then sometimes I wonder if I’m just insane, and all this is just too much. I get lost sometimes when I try to explain myself to people. But it seems to be working alright. That’s the other thing — explaining myself doesn’t seem to be going well for me.

I have mixed feelings about my first year review, which happened on Friday. I was — and still am, somewhat — incensed at the way I was treated, and especially the way some of my friends were treated. It’s one thing to give someone a hard time, ask them hard questions, and challenge them, but it’s another altogether to be rude and unprofessional. Maybe I shouldn’t be blogging that much about this, but it’s really been kind of demoralizing for me. I mean, they want to see what you’ve been doing in your first year, and for the most part, the things I’ve been working on have been superstructures and frameworks. These aren’t things that are going to be finished in one academic year, nor are they things that are going to be perfect.

Yet the small moves I’ve made toward implementing “real work” and thinking about that “real work” in the context of the superstructures I’ve been building are kind of hard to explain in fifteen minutes. I was really frustrated by the fact that there wasn’t time to talk about how these things work. And, under the impression that I was going to get more support — or, in other words, more real feedback — I tried to draw a sketch of this superstructure and show three very disparate things I’ve been working on and how I think they fit. First, I don’t think that really worked well. Second, I was really put off by the tone of the entire operation. Third, I was intentionally more aggressive than I probably should have been as a result. Eh. It’s too complex for me to want to write about at the moment.

Hopefully the end of the semester is the end to my brain cheese.

]]>https://thestreeet.wordpress.com/2010/03/28/burnout/feed/0CaydenThe Dilemma of Playing Political Gameshttps://thestreeet.wordpress.com/2010/03/18/the-dilemma-of-playing-political-games/
https://thestreeet.wordpress.com/2010/03/18/the-dilemma-of-playing-political-games/#respondThu, 18 Mar 2010 21:03:33 +0000http://thenoiseofthestreet.net/?p=590]]>Today Ian Bogost’s essay about political games was published on Kotaku. In it, he critiques the White House’s endorsement of using games as media to change people’s minds about issues — especially because there’s no evidence of follow-up that, say, helps the least advantaged economically find and afford healthier, more wholesome foods. Then, he levels his sights against the games industry for not demanding more of these educational games. We would “demand more of Valve or EA Sports or Blizzard,” he writes, pointing out that “games can do more” and that we should expect as much out of them, even though developing a good game takes more time and money than the government apparently is willing to invest in the medium.

I fully agree that this gesture from the Obama administration is just patting the medium on the head. I fully agree that games can do more. But as the chatter about serious games has heated up — in the industry, in government, in academia, and elsewhere — the critical eye to which we should turn our assumptions about the gamic medium has not surfaced in much (ahem) seriousness. I’ve been having a good conversation with the people behind the gleefully irreverent game/parody INVOKE, which is, of course, a reference to Jane McGonigal’s current project EVOKE, about this very issue. Before we can make serious games that really change the world we live in, we should think about how serious we are about serious games.

Look at it this way: video games are inextricably tied to the military-industrial complex. Not only were the first games developed in academic labs doing military research, this year’s Serious Games Summit at the GDC was sponsored by the Training and Simulation Journal, which is, uh, a defense industry journal. I’m not crazy, right? We should be a little concerned, right? (If you’re not, go look at TSJ’s website and tell me what you see.)

Video games are also inextricably tied to late capitalist modes of consumption and individuation. While this issue deserves more exploration to really illustrate my point, consider that in the video game the individual is allowed to be whatever ze wants to be, and if that particular persona is not interesting any longer, ze can opt to change games. And, as technology improves, mainstream titles have begun to feature more and more options to change your character — from the purely aesthetic to changes influenced by the player’s own moral choices throughout the game.

In the end, the crux of my issue is this: games as a medium may not be as progressively inclined as many in the serious games community would like to think they are. In fact, they spring directly from an institution that progressives tend to rail against. So why are we complaining about the government’s failure to invest the time, effort, and money necessary to develop great serious games, and not examining our own ideological assumptions as game developers and critics? Why are we relying entirely on the form? Or even in the case of McGonigal’s now-recognizable ARG form, why our derivative forms are so imbued with those old forms?

I know you may be thinking, of course we would want to use video games for change because the kids love ’em! But what I’m saying is not that we shouldn’t make video games (or other games that rely on contemporary technology) with an eye toward progressive goals, but that in doing so we must be more critical about the form, where it comes from, and what that means for our design practice.

I think Bogost scratches at the surface of this in his essay, but why stop at giving GDC attendees a hard time about their fawning over Michelle Obama? Why not call the entire institution (and it is an institution) of the “games industry” into question? Why not question the particular ways in which video games reconfigure the way we interact with one another? How about the way in which we structure, understand, and speak about space? And don’t forget that gamic ideologies of spatial organization are rooted, of course, in military discourses.

These are complex issues, and there will be no clear solutions. But the only way we can move forward — and counter the very crucial but somewhat half-baked games sponsored by the federal government — is to examine our discipline. (After all, why are the coolest games sponsored by the federal government military games?)

]]>https://thestreeet.wordpress.com/2010/03/18/the-dilemma-of-playing-political-games/feed/0CaydenThe Cyborg and the Camphttps://thestreeet.wordpress.com/2010/03/10/the-cyborg-and-the-camp/
https://thestreeet.wordpress.com/2010/03/10/the-cyborg-and-the-camp/#commentsWed, 10 Mar 2010 16:01:54 +0000http://thenoiseofthestreet.net/?p=588]]>So I’m a little stuck, and I like to think out loud here, so here I go. Because it’s here, I’d love to hear what you think about my thinking. I’ve been ruminating on this for a few days now and I’m not quite ready to conclude.

In Homo Sacer, Agamben describes the concentration camp as the most perfect implementation of biopower in human history, which, of course, implies that it is the outcome of any biopolitical environment, whether we are talking about totalitarian dictatorship or a liberal democratic welfare state. If this is what we face when we are facing down biopolitics, it’s clear that we need to break the cycle. The problem is, of course, that Agamben effectively proves that all politics have been biopolitics since the beginning of recorded Western history. In light of that, how do we “solve” the problem of biopolitics?

I’ve been thinking about this a little obsessively because the issue has become deeply personal. I don’t want to offer some kind of sophistic solution. I’d really like to — at least — point in a direction that might be fruitful for further investigation, or gesture at what I think might lead to politics beyond biopolitics. In thinking about the biopolitical situation, I couldn’t help but go back to Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” because she writes of biopolitics: “Michel Foucault’s biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics, a very open field.” [Emphasis mine.]

What could this mean? Is the cyborg a product of the concentration camp? Another possibility that has crossed my mind is — the cyborg is both a product of the technology required by the concentration camp, and produced by the concentration camp. Which would mean that the cyborg springs from the same source, and grows alongside, the concentration camp.

Haraway notes that “‘we’ did not originally choose to be cyborgs.” Cyborg is not an identity one may adopt, but rather an identity that is foisted upon the individual. If we are accidental cyborgs, perhaps it is the case that the cyborg is in some ways the product of the concentration camp. We cannot escape from its shadow and therefore are altered by it. The cruel science that comes out of the concentration camp — which Agamben writes about in some detail in Homo Sacer — describes the very dismantling of the coherent self that Haraway describes in “A Cyborg Manifesto.” The cyborg itself is a symbol of this dismantling, of taking the body piecemeal in the name of science and progress.

Even now I feel like I’m going too fast. There are other things that tie these ideas together. The cyborg is a rejection of bare life. Consider that the cyborg is the fusion of animal, man, and technology — none of these are separable into categories useful to define the cyborg without pulling apart the cyborg itself. (Which leads to more questions, like: how is bare life itself a pulling-apart of the individual? Is it fair for me to make this kind of assertion?)

In my defense, something that has always stood out to me in “A Cyborg Manifesto” is the following passage.

Feminisms and Marxisms have run aground on Western epistemological imperatives to construct a revolutionary subject from the perspective of a hierarchy of oppressions and/or a latent position of moral superiority, innocence, and greater closeness to nature. With no available original dream of a common language or original symbiosis promising protection from hostile ‘masculine’ separation, but written into the play of a text that has no finally privileged reading or salvation history, to recognize ‘oneself’ as fully implicated in the world, frees us of the need to root politics in identification, vanguard parties, purity, and mothering.

I think that this is the linchpin — where Haraway herself implicates the left in the practice of biopolitics, and where she gestures towards a rejection of biopolitics on the grounds of cyborg politics. I’m not ready to jump, of course, because I haven’t yet explored the counterarguments. But do you see where I’m going with this?

[This is bigger than I thought it was.]

]]>https://thestreeet.wordpress.com/2010/03/10/the-cyborg-and-the-camp/feed/2CaydenGSA Electionshttps://thestreeet.wordpress.com/2010/03/09/gsa-elections/
https://thestreeet.wordpress.com/2010/03/09/gsa-elections/#respondTue, 09 Mar 2010 16:39:36 +0000http://thenoiseofthestreet.net/?p=585]]>I don’t think I’ve written about the choice to run for GSA executive board here at all. As many of my more regular readers are undoubtedly aware, I do fancy myself a bit of a public intellectual and I think that civic involvement is both my right and my duty. I think I’ve found a situation that I can address from my perspective and my power, and add something to with my skills and knowledge. I want to make clear here that what I write in this blog is not the official line of our coalition, but rather my reasons for being a part of it.

One of the things that excites me most about the election is the very real possibility that we stand on the cusp of change. This is a critical time for public higher education, and it is also a critical time for the SUNY system, with Albany crumbling and funding drying up from the public sector. I don’t think I’m the only UB graduate student who’s alarmed by these developments — far from it. In fact, this isn’t an issue that is limited to people who are supposed to be “left-wing intellectuals” anymore. The public university is a critical site for scientific research, too — the kind of scientific research that needs to take place without being beholden to shareholders, for example.

Many newly-minted Ph.D.s and others with terminal degrees are being siphoned off to universities abroad. Now, I don’t think there’s a problem with finding a job in another country — I have fantasies about pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Copenhagen — but if U.S. institutions can’t keep Americans here, the American university system is going to go hollow. But more immediately than that, current graduate students are suffering because all kinds of resources are drying up. These are only some of the complaints and concerns I hear from graduate students. I also think that, if we combine our forces and present a united front, we might have a shot at getting listened to.

A lot of people seem to think that GSA is just a social organization, and I think there’s something to that. By getting to know each other and interacting face-to-face, learning about other disciplines and the cool research other grads are doing, these issues become more immediate. It’s great that GSA has offered opportunities for graduate students to interact in the past, and I’d like to see those opportunities continue and expand. But more than that, I think there’s potential in that interaction to realize the full potential of a room of cross-disciplinary representatives.

I kind of have this fantasy, where GSA Senate meetings produce actual conversation about issues that affect the graduate student body, and that those conversations enable us to tell people in power what we want and what we need. I think it would be beyond cool if we could remotely organize with leaders at the other SUNY schools, and even at CUNY schools, to talk about what we need from the state, and what we can give back to the state.

In the short-term, though, I think there is a ton of groundwork that we can lay for this kind of organization. And in some respects, we do need to act fast — as Albany fumbles over the enormous budget deficit, our jobs, educations and futures are on the chopping block. There is no reason why we can’t have a conversation about this together. I don’t believe for a second that we couldn’t come up with some suggestions that would soften the blow for both the university system, the graduate students, and the state, that doesn’t involve selling our heritage as a public institution short.

I guess I am running for GSA e-board because I am a UB believer, but not in that UB2020 kind of way. I believe that we have some systems in place that may allow us to affect change from the ground up as opposed to from the top down, it’s just a matter of mobilizing enough people. And even if that mobilization means that we spend some time arguing about what it is we actually want, at least people will start thinking about that. I don’t know that many people do. And since we don’t know what we want, we can’t start pushing the boundaries of what we can get.

We can do it, together. The future is ours, but there are a lot of things standing in our way. Our own preconceptions about power, control, and decision-making are the first, and perhaps the most important, of these things. Plus, there are others out there who share our concerns, and often share our challenges. I just want that message to get out there. We’re smart, we matter, and we don’t need to settle for disenfranchisement.

]]>https://thestreeet.wordpress.com/2010/03/09/gsa-elections/feed/0CaydenWorld Women’s Dayhttps://thestreeet.wordpress.com/2010/03/08/world-womens-day/
https://thestreeet.wordpress.com/2010/03/08/world-womens-day/#respondMon, 08 Mar 2010 21:42:10 +0000http://thenoiseofthestreet.net/?p=582]]>On this World Women’s Day, I can’t help but think about the ways in which we forget about women we don’t see, or don’t want to see. I think that the only way we can really move forward working for justice is by centering those who are faced with the most injustice — those who are repeatedly denied their basic human rights, or humanity to begin with. It wrenches my stomach to see so many of my friends support causes that regularly exclude people on the basis of their identities, exactly when they are fighting for justice. It isn’t enough to fight for justice for some. It’s time to fight for justice for all.

I’ve been trying to teach some of my undergraduates about the history of feminism that they don’t learn on TV. Of course, you don’t learn much on TV aside from bra-burning (which, I understand, never really happened) — which I guess doesn’t say much on one level. But on another level, there’s the fact that trans women are routinely erased from the history of the gay rights movement, too. After all, it was trans women (especially trans women of color) who led the charge at Stonewall. Why is it, then, that we say that Stonewall was a crucial moment in gay rights? It was a crucial moment in trans rights too, or rather, first.

I’ve been trying to explain to people that not only is it not my job to speak for all trans people (nor is it any trans person’s), it’s also absurd to ask me to really tell you about injustices committed against trans people. After all, the murder rate for trans masculine folks is still far and away closer to the murder rate for the general population. On the other hand, trans women face numbers closer to one in twelve. While some days I spend adrift, feeling alienated from much of the world that surrounds me, I am rarely threatened. I continue to be privileged in other ways, too — I live a comfortable life, to be sure.

And I can’t help but think that some days I continue to wake up and go about my life, collude in the oppression of others, even when my writing and work continually grows, becomes more deeply rooted in a tradition of anti-oppression activism, and I become more and more ferocious an advocate for an agenda that leaves nobody behind.

Recently the publisher of the book my essay “On Love, and Its Place in the Academy” will appear in changed the name of the volume. It’s awful. I was incredibly incensed by it, as well as by the idiotic, othering text of the book flyer. The flyer notes that the book’s contributors are “women, men, and transgender people.” The book’s title explicitly states it’s about empowering women. We all know what that means.

I talked to my editor about it on Friday. I feel anxious and stupid, but it’s also a bit late to have material entirely stricken from the volume. I’m not sure I entirely buy her arguments about including my essay as a choice of the “lesser of two evils.” Including another voice is good, of course. But in what ways am I degendered in this process? In what ways does my inclusion, and the exclusion of others (for example, trans women, none of whom appear in the volume) do a disservice to the spirit behind the book’s publication? In what ways does the exclusion of trans women from the publication reflect the exclusion of trans women in academia? In society?

I want to make clear, on World Women’s Day, that this kind of shit rips me up inside. I don’t think we have to settle for less. I don’t think we should think of our decisions as choices between the lesser of two evils — because there is something that is decidedly un-evil out there, and that’s empowerment and work against oppression. But I have settled for less. I’ve given in.

But I’ve also learned my first lesson of publishing. And that is: don’t get too excited. Always make sure that you’re ready to stand behind the publisher, the editor, and the publication. With mainstream academic publishing (which, by the way, also wrests legal rights from the authors), this is generally pretty hard to do. As an academic, as a human being, I deserve better. We all deserve better. And I promise here and now it won’t happen again.

]]>https://thestreeet.wordpress.com/2010/03/08/world-womens-day/feed/0CaydenAgainst Nihilismhttps://thestreeet.wordpress.com/2010/03/06/against-nihilism/
https://thestreeet.wordpress.com/2010/03/06/against-nihilism/#respondSat, 06 Mar 2010 15:08:04 +0000http://thenoiseofthestreet.net/?p=576]]>There is a fine line, in critiquing the institutions you thrive on, between nihilism and the injunction to think about them in radically different ways, especially when your critique is as far-reaching as Giorgio Agamben’s in Homo Sacer. I had an argument recently about whether or not Agamben’s book is political — I think it is. In fact, it seems absurd to say that he argues against politics entirely. He explicitly writes:

The idea of an inner solidarity between democracy and totalitarianism…is obviously not…a historiographical claim, which would authorize the liquidation and leveling of the enormous differences that characterize their history and their rivalry. Yet this idea must nevertheless be strongly maintained on a historico-philosophical level, since it alone will allow us to orient ourselves in relation to the new realities and unforseen convergences of the end of the millenium. This idea alone will make it possible to clear the way for the new politics, which remains largely to be invented.

Which is to say, of course, that Agamben knows he doesn’t have the answers, but rather that he thinks the answers are in the offing if we engage his analysis of the underlying ideological overlaps between liberal democracy and the totalitarian state. He is not implying that we should be apolitical (in fact, this should be an injunction to be political, just not the kind of political that is average or expected). His text is, I think, deeply political.

The implications of bowing to a nihilism that might grow out of the shared basis of both democracy and totalitarianism — that is, the nihilism that grows out of the realization that biopolitics underpins virtually all the politics of recorded Western history — are grave. If we accept this nihilism, we damn ourselves to the future we are building for ourselves in security checkpoints, terror warning levels, and even the refusal of a nationalized health care plan. We accept that there will be the kind of genocidal mass killing, ruthless dictatorship, and tactical abduction of political prisoners in the 21st century, as there has been in the 20th. These are all instruments of biopolitical control, but in order to solve the impasse between security and freedom, health and economy, debate and stability, Agamben writes that we must think beyond biopolitics.

To say that Agamben’s critique of biopolitics is a critique of political life is entirely absurd. This week (spring break!) I am going to explore the idea of political life beyond biopolitics, because I believe it is not only possible to think a politics that rejects biopolitics, it is also ultimately essential. Oh, and I also want to prove a point.

]]>https://thestreeet.wordpress.com/2010/03/06/against-nihilism/feed/0CaydenThis is Really Not a Gamehttps://thestreeet.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/this-is-really-not-a-game/
https://thestreeet.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/this-is-really-not-a-game/#respondMon, 01 Mar 2010 17:01:31 +0000http://thenoiseofthestreet.net/?p=570]]>As friend and colleague Adam Liszkiewicz has recently noted, FarmVille is a terrible game. It doesn’t even really qualify as a game, under Roger Caillois’s six criteria of games, and no matter what credence you give to classical ludology, you have to admit — there is an unprecedented number of people who continue to play, despite the absence of any of the rewards of play, or any of the rewards of labor. Zynga, the company that runs FarmVille, continues to make an absurd amount of money from hooking or scamming its players. Which is something that Jesse Schell neglects to mention in his DICE 2010 talk about design outside the box.

Now, before I begin, let me make perfectly clear that I am skeptical of the idea that Caillois’s criteria constitute a complete and definitive measure of a game. (i.e., I think that Caillois’s criteria are necessary but not sufficient.) Nor am I resistant to the idea that this definition can change. However, thinking about Martin Roberts’ talk at a conference this past fall and reading a bunch of Adorno has turned me a bit curmudgeonly. Ultimately, I think there are not a lot of people who are really enthusiastic about the things that games can do, while simultaneously being skeptical about certain deployments of gaming and the “fun” buzzword. And, as an industry and community, we desperately need more of that attitude.

In Man, Play, and Games(1961), Caillois defines six criteria by which we can determine a game. Games must befree from obligation, separate from real life, uncertain in outcome, unproductive, governed by rules,andmake-believe. In his paper “Cultivated Play,” Liszkiewicz illustrates how FarmVille fulfills none of these criteria. Though we might argue that FarmVille is still make-believe, since the player is, at least nominally, pretending to be a farmer, FarmVille is absolutely not free from obligation, entirely separate from real life, uncertain in outcome, and unproductive. So let me reiterate Liszkiewicz’s point, from a softer standpoint: FarmVille does not satisfy all of Roger Caillois’s six gamic criteria, therefore it is not a game.

If FarmVille is arguably not a game, Schell’s “games” are definitely not games. The fact that Schell introduces his ideas about the future through the avenue of FarmVille’s puzzling success should be telling. To be clear: the games that Schell describes are certainly not free from obligation, moreso than FarmVille. Nor are they separate from real life (the games are real life — again, a more extreme position than FarmVille). These games are bit more uncertain in their outcomes, yet specific actions will always lead to specific reactions. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be good marketing and data mining. Schell’s games are absolutely productive. They are in no way make-believe.

And while they might be governed by the same kinds of “rules” that FarmVille is governed by, the game logic expressed by the rewards system is, I argue, not a true rules system in the sense that say, chess or Halo 2 has a true rules system. While there is a pleasantly simple mathematical logic to the way that a game like FarmVille works — e.g., the player executes an action, is rewarded with a predetermined result — there is no rule structure above and beyond that. There is no strategy. There is not even a way players can break the implicit rules of the game, except to cease play. The structure of the kind of games that Schell describes is no different.

So to call what Schell describes “games” is disingenuous at best, patently false at worst. The need for a critical eye on the development of non-games is more important now than it has ever been, with a class-action lawsuit filed against Zynga, and an alternate reality game sponsored by the World Bank Institute. I don’t think that there is anything wrong with an organization like the WBI sponsoring a game. Nor do I think game companies should not try to make money. What I am calling for is a careful examination of what we call a game, and what we esteem in the games we play.

A healthy attitude of skepticism is missing from the games industry, and I don’t mean criticizing Grand Theft Auto for graphic depictions of sexuality and violence. This is bigger than that: it’s about the way our society thinks about and values games in general, not just the ethical implications of their content. Just because it is marketed to us a game does not mean it is fun, or pleasurable, or even a game, for that matter. It does not mean that it is a good. And it doesn’t mean that there is not underlying ideology that drives design and implementation.

Yet it’s easy to forget that, with the games industry trouncing Hollywood in profits and encouraging data coming out of more experimental forms like alternate reality gaming. The cult of fun is something that worries me, from a moral and aesthetic standpoint. Fun may be blinding us to the ideological quandaries our play is built on.

﻿I am a game designer, theorist, and hacker. You might say that game design is my artistic practice. But I don’t really want to talk about games tonight, because I spend a lot of time talking about them in other venues. Instead, I wanted to take this opportunity to talk about a more personal aspect of my practice, one which is based upon my complex set of social identities — compiled into a single identity that we might call cyborg identity. This is the first and foremost way in which I am a hacker.

We are all cyborgs in a Harawayan sense. We are amalgamations of complicated histories of violence, socialization, and the internalization of the oppression that surrounds us. In her 1989 “Cyborg Manifesto”, Donna Haraway writes about the ways in which feminism has failed women of color and women in the Global South. She neglects to mention the group which has been failed most violently by feminism, transgender people. Feminism has a nasty history of erasing transgender people: denying the humanity and womanhood of trans women, fetishizing and degendering trans men, and rejecting legitimacy of all people who queer gender. This is a topic for another talk entirely — what matters tonight is that Haraway is not trying to squeeze all non-men into a certain framework. She is trying to pull apart the tangle of identity.

The interesting thing about Haraway’s exclusion of transgender identities from her discussion of cyborgs is that we are perfect examples of cyborg praxis. By that I mean, we have bodies mediated in complex, meaningful ways by technology which, in many cases must be separated into component parts (and we are often examined as medical curiosities and rarely treated as holistic people); we have a preoccupation with the technologies of writing and language; and regardless of the complex gender identity we claim for ourselves, we represent an embodied experience of dissonance, language-play, Deleuzian multiplicity, and mediation. Trans people are living rejections of a dualism that separates the mind from the body: by virtue of our trans-ness, we refuse that there is any division at all.

The best explanation we can often offer to cis people about our justification for our “deviant” behavior and our need for medical care is that our minds don’t match our bodies. But that’s crazy talk. Of course one’s mind matches one’s body. They are inseparable. When we consider that we think as much with our bodies as we do with our minds — that our bodies are what draw lines between what is known and what is possible — it seems ridiculous to say that there is a separation. (Which is to say nothing of the philosophical untenability of dualism.) When we consider that queer identities are not explicable via genetics, or neuroscience, or sociology, or psychology alone, we must recognize that the roots of identity are deep and complex, too complex for the disjointed work of “experts.”

This lack of a separation is most boldly exemplified in experimental self care and medical care. I have been this kind of a hacker for the past six or seven years. For me, hacking started with so-called “cross-dressing.” A suit and tie, the layers of binding which hide the body underneath. The adoption of an androgynous name — first as a nickname, then as a legal fact. The negotiations of doctors and gatekeepers. Testosterone therapy. Confusing people on the street, in shops, restaurants, and positions of authority. When I went to get my New York State driver license, the DMV officials argued amongst themselves if my driver license should carry an F for female, or an M for male.

These interventions are all enabled by technology — weaving, sewing, medicine, language, writing, synthetic materials, the automobile. The transgender experience is deeply mediated, as is the experience of all. But what sets the mediation of transgender selves apart is the intentional use of technology to change our being-in-the-world, and the lack of obvious alternatives. I would even go so far as to say we appropriate the technology of our oppressors — we hack not just our selves but our society; we hack not just our society but our oppression.

In the Manifesto, Haraway explains that “Writing is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs, etched surfaces of the late twentieth century. Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism.” And, no, there is no perfect way to speak about transgender identities. Because my trans-ness is a fusion of human, animal and machine, something profound and profane, I cannot describe accurately what it is I am, what it is I am doing. It’s what’s so difficult when we have conversations about the rights of transgender people: the lack of clear parallel makes us an easy Other, and the best intentions often become the most dangerous hurdles.

I will say this — I exist outside the totalities that society expects me to conform to. I do this with intension, with a Harawayan sense of irony. I am playing with the bits I’m supposed to have and the bits I’m not, but can get. This play is deadly serious. My very motion through social space is a challenge, a subversion of heterosexual (and even homosexual) desires. Because I am not a man. I am not a woman. (But what are you, you might ask?) There are not words to describe what I am, so I must invent them. They come piecemeal from a variety of traditions and languages, from a fragmentary consciousness of a fragmented body.

“The cyborg is a kind of dissassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self,” says Haraway. To take apart the gender that has been imposed upon you, to make alterations to it, remove constituent parts which are unsuitable and add new ones entirely, this what it is to be transgender. It’s not that I am learning to be a man. I am unlearning — not to achieve some essential state of nature, but to become singular. And so the self becomes art and artifact, the product of intellectual effort, medicine, pageantry, inspiration, and nonbinary logic.

There will be no return to nature. The state of nature is an anachronism, for not only is it impossible for us to renounce our technological augmentation, by embracing it we acknowledge the state of nature as a tool of oppression. To live a cyborg is to liberate oneself from this onerous fantasy. There is no state of nature. There is no original sin. There are people, traces and pieces, littered all over the world.

I am no more complicated than anyone else. It’s just that I’ve spent a good long time sitting with my complexity, looking it dead in its many eyes. And if there is one thing I have learned it is that we ought not settle for the status quo. We have every right as cyborgs to demand more, to move forward joyously demanding no less than justice for all. We gain nothing by pretending at simplicity, at circumscribing categories onto ourselves, and denying that our whole selves are cultural and artistic artifacts. We stand to reclaim our autonomy by hacking our bodies, our society, and our oppressions.